How to compete and grow: A sector guide to policy.

McKinsey Global Institute
How to compete and grow:
A sector guide to policy
March 2010

The McKinsey Global Institute
The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), established in 1990, is McKinsey & Company’s
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Copyright © McKinsey & Company 2010

James Manyika
Lenny Mendonca
Jaana Remes
Stefan Klußmann
Richard Dobbs
Kuntala Karkun
Vitaly Klintsov
Christina Kükenshöner
Mikhail Nikomarov
Charles Roxburgh
Jörg Schubert
Tilman Tacke
Antti Törmänen
March 2010
How to compete and grow:
A sector guide to policy

4
Preface
How to compete and grow: A sector guide to policy builds not only on McKinsey &
Company’s industry expertise but on nearly two decades of sector-level analysis
by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) in more than 20 countries and 28 industrial
sectors. The report is part of a broader ongoing MGI research effort on the topic of
growth and renewal. In the latest research, we have studied competitiveness and
growth in six industries (retail, software and IT services, tourism, semiconductors,
automotive, and steel) across eight countries in each case, including both emerging
and high-income economies. Many governments have signaled their intention to
become more proactive in the market in pursuit of sustainable growth and enhanced
competitiveness. Our aspiration is to provide a fact base for such efforts and to inform
the private sector's dialog with policy makers around the world.
Jaana Remes, MGI senior fellow, led this project, with guidance from James Manyika,
Lenny Mendonca, Vitaly Klintsov, and Jörg Schubert. The project team comprised
Kuntala Karkun, Stefan Klußmann, Christina Kükenshöner, Mikhail Nikomarov,
Tilman Tacke, and Antti Törmänen. The team also benefited from the contributions of
Janet Bush, MGI senior editor, who provided editorial support; Rebeca Robboy, MGI
external communications manager; Vilas Kotkar, team assistant; and Marisa Carder
and Therese Khoury, visual graphics specialists.
We are grateful for the vital input and support of numerous McKinsey colleagues
around the world. These include Ruslan Alikhanov, Andreas Baumgartner, Frank
Bekaert, Philippe Bideau, Stefan Biesdorf, Urs Binggeli, Francois Bouvard, Harry
Bowcott, Dirk Breitschwerdt, Stefan Burghardt, Justin Byars, V. Chandrasekar,
Michael Chui, John Dowdy, Karel Eloot, Christoph Eltze, Luis Enriquez, Daniel
Feldmann, Christophe François, Steffen Fuchs, Christian Gschwandtner, Toralf
Hagenbruch, David Hajman, Stefan Heck, Russell Hensley, Michael Herter, Martin
Hjerpe, Scott Jacobs, Noshir Kaka, Osamu Kaneda, Axel Kalthoff, Martin Kolling,
Stefan Knupfer, Axel Krieger, Kevin Krogmann, Sigurd Mareels, Tim McGuire, Sarah
Monroe, Nicolai Muller, Yuji Nakahara, James Naylor, Bettina Neuhaus, Becca
O'Brien, Loralei Osborn, Andreas Pecher, Tom Pepin, Niels Phaf, Luiz Pires, Philipp
Radtke, Stefan Rehbach, Sergio Sandoval, Vishal Sarin, Yasushi Sawada, Sven
Smit, Robert Stemmler, John Strevel, Yeonkyung Sung, Mourad Taoufiki, Fraser
Thompson, Davide Vassena, Ruben Verhoeven, Sanjay Verma, Uma Vohra, Bill
Wiseman, Dilip Wagle, Jonathan Woetzel, Jiajun Wu, Simei Wu, and Andreas Zielke.
Distinguished experts outside McKinsey provided invaluable insights and advice.
We would particularly like to thank Martin N. Baily, a senior adviser to McKinsey and
a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; Dani Rodrik, professor of International
Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

5How to compete and grow: A sector guide to policy
This report contributes to MGI’s mission to help global leaders understand the
forces transforming the global economy, improve company performance, and work
for better national and international policies. As with all MGI research, we would
like to emphasize that this work is independent and has not been commissioned or
sponsored in any way by any business, government, or other institution.
James Manyika
Director, McKinsey Global Institute
Director, McKinsey & Company, San Francisco
Richard Dobbs
Director, McKinsey & Company, Seoul
Susan Lund
Director of Research, McKinsey Global Institute
Charles Roxburgh
Director, McKinsey & Company, London
March 2010

How to compete and grow: A sector guide to policy
7
Contents
Executive summary 9
1. Looking at sectors is the key 17
to understanding competitiveness and growth
2. Patterns in sector contributions to growth 23
challenge conventional wisdom
2.1 The competitiveness of sectors matters more 26
than the sector mix
2.2 To generate jobs, service-sector competitiveness is the key 28
2.3 Competitiveness in new innovative sectors 29
is not enough to boost economy-wide employment and growth
3. Governments need to tailor policy to each sector 31
Bibliography 50

9
As we emerge slowly from the first global recession since World War II, governments
and businesses share an overarching aim—to steer their economies toward
increasing competitiveness and growth. Many business leaders advocate a greater
role for government in this effort. Intel Corporation’s former chairman Craig Barrett
has urged governments to implement policies “to grow smart people and smart
ideas.”1
Rolls-Royce chief executive Sir John Rose has argued for the credit crunch to
be a catalyst for a sharper focus on industrial competitiveness.2
Many governments are already being more proactive in trying to boost growth and
competitiveness. Given the fragility of the business and economic climate—and
strained public coffers—the responsibility to get policy right, and thereby and create a
solid foundation for long-term growth, is acute.
Fostering growth and competitiveness is a perennial challenge among policy
priorities, but past experience shows that governments have, at best, a mixed
record in this regard. There have been solid successes but also damaging
failures—ineffective interventions that have proved costly to the public purse, and
even regulation that has had negative, unintended consequences for the conduct of
business.
An important reason why government intervention in markets has been hit or miss is
that action has tended to be based on academic and policy research that has looked
through an economy-wide lens to understand competitiveness—in other words,
whether one country is “more competitive” than another.
The top-down analysis has all too often failed to capture the fact that the conditions that
promote competitiveness differ significantly from sector to sector—and so therefore
do the most effective potential regulations and policies. The McKinsey Global Institute
(MGI) has analyzed the performance of more than 20 countries and nearly 30 industry
sectors (see box 1 “Defining sector competitiveness and growth”). On the basis of our
experience, we believe that effective policy making needs a new approach.
Only by analyzing what drives growth and competitiveness in different sectors
of the economy—and then tailoring the policy response and executing policy in
close collaboration with the private sector—can governments boost their odds
of intervening effectively. This paper seeks to provide fact-based insights to help
governments make the right decisions and trade-offs, drawing on MGI's bottom-up,
sector-based approach.
1 Davos: Craig Barrett on the post-crisis world, January 29, 2009
http://blogs.intel.com/csr/2009/01/.
2 “Made in Britain,” World in 2009 edition, Economist, November 19, 2008.
Executive summary

10
Box 1. Defining sector competitiveness and growth
Competitiveness is a fuzzy term used to mean many different things. For each
sector, MGI defines competitiveness as a capacity to sustain growth through
either increasing productivity or expanding employment.3
A competitive sector
is one in which companies improve their performance by increasing productivity
through managerial and technological innovations, and offer better quality or
lower-priced goods and services, thereby expanding demand for their products.
This approach enables us to shed light on the microeconomic dynamics
behind growth in each sector, to identify variations in the relative competitive
performance of different sectors, and to analyze the impact of different policy
choices on growth and employment.
MGI’s definition applies equally to sectors that produce tradable products, like
cars, and those that produce nontradable services, such as retail.
Capturing global market share. For tradable goods and services,
competitiveness makes intuitive sense as the attractiveness of a location for
new investments and the capacity of local operations to compete regionally
or globally, generating growth in their sector overall. For example, Brazil has
become the largest poultry exporter in the world by combining global best-
practice processes with low factor costs; the poultry industry created jobs and
growth in the host economy as a result.
Growing domestic market. For local services, we also interpret
competitiveness as the capacity to generate growth. However, in these sectors,
growth comes from the creation and expansion of a domestic market. Those
service sectors that offer appealing services and products at attractive prices
to local consumers and businesses will create jobs and boost productivity. For
example, a higher-cost and more limited restaurant and hotel offering in Sweden
explains why consumers spend less than half as much of their consumption on
these services as in the United Kingdom.
PATTERNS IN SECTOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO GROWTH
CHALLENGE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
To reach a better understanding of the underlying drivers of competitiveness, and
the policies that empirically have been successful in promoting it, we studied the
competitiveness and growth of six industries (retail, software and IT services, tourism,
steel, automotive, and semiconductors) across eight or more countries in each case,
including both emerging and high-income economies. Drawing on national account
data and McKinsey’s global industry expertise, we measured differences in sector
growth performance across countries and assessed what factors have been critical for
explaining the competitiveness in each industry (e.g., skills and scale in semiconductor
products; access to low-cost raw materials and energy, and efficient operations
in steel). We then studied how different government policies have influenced the
competitiveness levers and growth performance of different countries.
3 By sector growth, we mean increases in sector value added—the contribution of a sector to
overall GDP growth. The economy-wide growth impact across sectors is a function of both
individual sector growth contributions and the changes in shares of above- and below-average
productivity sectors.

This report shares some of the key findings from the research. We believe that the
lessons that emerge from our case studies are applicable to other sectors, both
existing and emerging, and countries across different income levels.
By analyzing competitiveness at the sector level, we reach conclusions that
run counter to the way many policy makers think about the task in hand. Many
governments worry about the “economic mix”—and assume that if they achieve the
“right” mix, higher competitiveness and growth will follow; our analysis finds that
solving for mix is not sufficient. To avoid wasting their effort and resources, policy
makers cannot take a one-size-fits all view, proposing identical policy solutions for
globally competed sectors—whose competitiveness is not easy for governments to
influence directly—and largely domestic sectors where regulation is often decisive.
While many policy makers see innovative technologies as the answer to the challenge
of job creation, our analysis indicates that governments are likely to be disappointed
in such hopes. It may not capture the popular imagination but the quest for new
jobs is much more likely to bear fruit in large local business and household-services
sectors. Policy makers also need to take account of the stage of development of their
economy. Sector contributions to GDP growth vary at different stages of a country's
economic evolution and policy makers need to learn different skills sets in their efforts
to enhance growth and competitiveness.4
Some of the key insights arising from our research are:
The competitiveness of sectors matters more than the mix
Some governments worry about the “mix” of their economies but our research
finds that countries that outperform their peers do not have a more favorable sector
mix that propels them to higher growth. Instead, their individual sectors are more
competitive. The sectors that fuel growth by performing exceptionally strongly vary by
country. What above-average growth countries have in common is that their existing
large employment sectors—such as retail and restaurants; food processing; and
construction—pull their weight by posting strong growth.
To generate jobs, service-sector competitiveness is the key
Many governments are looking to manufacturing sectors as a new source for growth and
jobs in the aftermath of the financial and real-estate sector bust. But our research finds
that services will continue to be critical for job creation. Productivity improvements are
a key factor in all sectors but most job growth has come from services. In high-income
economies, service sectors accounted for all net job growth between 1995 and 2005.
Even in middle-income countries, where industry contributes almost half of overall GDP
growth, 85 percent of net new jobs came from service sectors. So policy makers should
ensure that domestic service sectors also continue to pull their weight.
Policy impacts nontradable sector competitiveness directly—in
tradable sectors, getting policy right is more complicated
Policy makers should take into account the fact that their influence on largely
nontradable “domestic” sectors is more direct than it is in those sectors that compete
globally. In nontradable sectors, sector performance correlates closely with the local
4 In the early post-agricultural phase, the industrial sectors of middle-income countries tend to
peak and then decline. In these economies, goods-producing sectors contribute almost half of
economic growth, with services accounting for the rest. As incomes rise, the share of services
continues to grow. Almost 90 percent of overall GDP growth in developed countries came
from services between 1995 and 2005.

12
policy environment that sets the “rules of the game” for competitive market dynamics.
Whether in telecommunications or retail, MGI case studies show that the employment
and productivity outcomes of countries reflect the incentives to companies set by
regulation. Regulation that facilities business entry tends to increase competition and
productivity, while flexible hiring laws, lower minimum wages, and part-time employment
arrangements correlate with higher employment and more rapid adjustment to change.
Policy changes can impact sector performance in two to three years.5
In traded sectors, where success requires local companies to be competitive in the
regional or global marketplace, policy requires broader understanding of the global
industry landscape. Some regulations can unexpectedly halt sector growth—as
obscure national security review requirements did for Russian software exports. In
addition, financial incentives to failed initiatives can cost governments billions—as many
semiconductor ventures have done around the globe. For the best odds for sustained
growth, efforts to enhance competitiveness should target those activities with a
realistic potential for competitive advantage and be based on solid business logic.
Competitiveness in new innovative sectors is not enough to boost
economy-wide employment and growth
Many policy makers are pinning their hopes today on innovative new sectors such
as cleantech as the answer to the challenges of competitiveness, growth, and jobs.
Yet the innovative emerging sectors themselves are too small to make a difference
to economy-wide growth. Take the case of semiconductors. With employment of
0.5 percent or less even among mature developed economies, the sector’s direct
contribution to GDP is limited. But ongoing innovations in the sector have contributed
to the IT adoption that has improved business processes and boosted productivity in
many other sectors—and therefore made a difference for economy-wide growth. Yet
these broad user benefits often don’t require local suppliers. In fact, policy efforts to
protect local sector growth—such as Brazil’s unique television standards—can halt
growth if they increase costs and reduce the adoption and use of new technologies.
For instance, low-tech, green jobs in local services—such as improving building
insulation and replacing obsolete heating and cooling equipment—have greater
potential to generate jobs than the development of renewable technology solutions. For
policy makers concerned with abating carbon emissions in the near term, pushing the
adoption and diffusion of low-carbon solutions is likely to make a bigger difference than
technology production alone.
GOVERNMENTS NEED TO TAILOR POLICY TO EACH SECTOR
Tailoring policy for the myriad of different sectors in an economy is a complex
task. For this reason, MGI has produced a new framework that we hope will help
bring some clarity to government approaches to growth and competitiveness and
streamline the necessary analysis.
We have identified six sector groups that share characteristics and respond to
similar approaches to enhancing competitiveness: (1) infrastructure services; (2)
local services; (3) business services; (4) research and development (R&D)-intensive
manufacturing; (5) manufacturing; and (6) resource-intensive industries (Exhibit E1).
In each of these groups, we document how competitiveness levers vary and how
policy has influenced competitiveness in each. We believe that these six categories
5 William Lewis, “The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability,”
Chicago University Press, new edition October 21, 2005.

provide a useful framework for understanding what determines competitiveness in
different kinds of industries and what tangible actions governments and businesses
can take to improve competitiveness.
Exhibit E1
1.6
1.2
0
100101
0.4
0.8
-0.8
-0.4 Infrastructure
Local
services
Business
services
Resource-
intensive
industries
Manufacturing
R&D-intensive
manufacturing
MGI categorizes sectors into six groups according to degrees of
differentiation and tradability
SOURCE: EU KLEMS growth and productivity accounts; OECD input-output tables; McKinsey Global Institute analysis
Size of circle = relative amount
of sector value added in 2005
Differentiation index
0 = average
Differentiationofproducts
High
Low
Tradability of products
Imports plus exports divided by sector gross output
%
Low High
EXHIBIT E1
Electricity
Construction
Hotels and restaurants
Land
transport
Wholesale and
retail trade
Post and
telecommunication Finance and
insurance
Real-estate
activities
Computer and
related activities
R&D
Pulp, paper, printing,
and publishing
Agriculture,
forestry,
and fishing
Wood
products
Rubber and plastics
Basic
metals
Fabricated metals
Machinery and
equipment
Motor vehicles
Pharma
Chemicals
Radio, TV, and
communication
equipment
Medical
instruments
Aircraft and spacecraft
Other
Other
The spectrum of public policy interventions ranges from a hands-off approach limited
to creating the necessary market institutions to being a central operator in a sector.
We analyzed the policies used in different sectors in four categories that demonstrate
an increasing intensity of intervention:
1. Setting the ground rules and direction. Governments can limit sector policies
to setting the regulatory environment including labor and capital-market and
general business regulation, and setting broad national priorities and roadmaps.
2. Building enablers. Without interfering with the market mechanism, governments
can support the private sector by expanding hard and soft infrastructure;
educating and training a skilled workforce; and supporting R&D.
3. Tilting the playing field. Governments can choose to create favorable conditions
for local production, typically through trade protection from global competition;
through the provision of financial incentives for local operations; or by shaping
local demand growth through public purchasing or regulation.
4. Playing the role of principal actor. At the interventionist end of the policy spectrum,
governments may play a direct role by establishing state-owned or subsidized
companies; funding existing businesses to ensure their survival; and imposing
restructuring on certain industries.
We found clear patterns linking sector competitiveness levers and effective policy, which
governments need to factor into their design of competitiveness policies (Exhibit E2).

14
Exhibit E2
Government policy tools need to be tailored to suit
sector competitiveness drivers
SOURCE: McKinsey Global Institute/Public Sector Office Competitiveness Project
Government as
principal actor
Tilting the
playing fieldBuilding enablers
Setting ground
rules/direction
EXHIBIT E2
Infrastructure
Degree of intervention
HighLow
Resource-intensive
industries
Infrastructure
R&D-intensive
manufacturing
Business services
Local
services
Manufacturing
In domestic sectors like telecommunications or retail that have limited trade, local
regulation can directly determine the rules of the game and therefore guide both
competitiveness and performance—yet in radically different ways in the various
local sectors.
1. In infrastructure services like telecommunications, large economies of scale
require that the regulatory environment finds the right balance between the cost
savings available from single large-scale operators (who can amortize network
build-out costs at a lower cost per customer and save on other fixed operating
costs) with the incentives created by competition to offer new, attractive, and
affordable service packages to the consumer. Early on, the United States
auctioned wireless spectrum licenses for relatively small geographic areas with
the aim of promoting competition. As a result, the 50-plus fragmented operators
that emerged had much smaller subscriber bases and higher per-user costs
shortly after they won licenses than mobile operators in France or Germany—that
had three and four operators, respectively. The goal of competitive infrastructure
services is typically not only to boost sector growth but also to ensure the broad
penetration of high-quality infrastructure services that can raise productivity and
output growth elsewhere.
2. In a local service sector such as retail, business turnover tends to be high
and growth comes from more productive companies gaining share or replacing
less productive ones. Competitive intensity is a key driver, providing an incentive
for ongoing innovation and the adoption of better practices and ensuring that
productivity gains are passed on to consumers in the form of more attractive
products and lower prices. These more appealing offerings in turn boost demand,
creating a virtuous cycle of expanding domestic demand and sector growth.
Productivity and employment in retail sectors around the world vary widely—
largely due to regulation, MGI research shows. Regulation that allows the
expansion of more modern retail formats raises productivity. After opening the
sector to foreign investors, Russian retail productivity has more than doubled in
the past ten years from 15 percent of the US level to 31 percent on the back of

gaining share of modern retailers. In Sweden, the liberalization of opening hours
and zoning regulation unleashed competition, and productivity increased at an
average of 4.6 percent for ten years after 1995. In contrast, France introduced
more restrictive rules on the size of retail outlets in the 1990s, halting the sector’s
productivity growth. Flexible hiring laws, lower minimum wages, and part-time
employment arrangements tend to boost retail employment and service levels, as
we have seen in the United States and the United Kingdom.
In innovative, globally competing sectors such as software and semiconductors,
global industry dynamics and competition between companies are the key factors
driving overall performance. In such sectors, it is harder for governments to have as
direct an influence. What matters more is creating a strong enabling environment
for private-sector success. Yet actions to boost competitiveness and the odds of
success vary widely depending on the underlying industry economics. For instance,
despite sustained public support for the development of local semiconductor
clusters in several countries in recent years, the strong winner-takes-all dynamic of
this sector has been prohibitive to new entrants.
3. In business services like software and IT services, access to talent—at the
right cost—is a necessary condition for competitiveness. India, the Republic of
Ireland, and Israel, all countries with exceptionally rapid IT services export growth,
had a pool of skilled engineers available at a globally competitive cost. Favorable
demand conditions—through strong local industry links (e.g., wireless in Finland),
or public defense or other contracts (as in the United States)—have also helped
nurture growth in these sectors. However, while many regions provide tax
incentives for inbound software multinationals, MGI research suggests that such
incentives are less critical and often unnecessary. And direct public ventures have
failed to sustain competitiveness in the global market.
4. In R&D-intensive manufacturing such as semiconductors, the right enabling
environment is as important as it is in software, but the capital intensity and
very large economies of scale change the competitive dynamic. All sustained
semiconductor clusters have benefited from public support. Such support has
included early defense contracts in the United States and the provision of public
capital in South Korea and Taiwan, hosts respectively to the world’s leading
companies in the memory and foundry segments. Yet because of the very large
economies of scale in new fabs and technology in today’s mature industry,
there have been no new semiconductor clusters in the past 15 years that have
generated sustained growth—despite efforts in Singapore, China, Germany,
and many other regions. Large public investment incentives have led to very low
returns to capital in the industry overall.
In industrial sectors like automotive and steel, competitiveness depends on a
broad set of factors that collectively determine the “value for money” delivered. The
competitive advantage of a location varies depending on the subsegment or even
step in the value chain. As a result, there is a much broader array of policy tools
available. Even so, policy has a mixed track record. The odds of success depend
on whether the efforts are targeting activities that can have an inherent competitive
advantage in the location, and on the execution of policy.
5. In manufacturing sectors like automotive, sector performance relates to the
capacity of locally based companies to continue to offer attractive products at
a competitive cost. Yet government policy has fundamentally shaped the sector
both through trade policies that have created the regionalized industry and through
increasingly high industry subsidies that have encouraged investment and capacity

16
expansion globally. Experience shows that while trade protection has helped create
local industries in many countries, it leads to low productivity. But when India, for
instance, removed trade and investment barriers, productivity more than tripled. A
range of other policies—from export promotion to state-owned car companies—
have had mixed success and have been expensive. Host governments’ subsidies
of more than $100,000 per job are provided in developed and developing countries
alike, contributing to today’s global overcapacity.
6. In resource-intensive industries like steel, government intervention has played
a role in most countries, but the policy tools employed have evolved over time. In a
sector’s early development phase, governments have supported growth through
trade barriers and financial support including subsidized funding and public
investments. While most protected industries lag behind global best-practice
productivity as a result, South Korea’s Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO)
managed to develop from being a supported state-owned steel company into a
leading global company today. In all cases, sustained competitiveness after the
initial developmental phase has required increasing exposure to global competition.
When the sector is mature, government's main role has been helping coordinate the
downsizing of the industry. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the European Community
(EC) responded to the sector’s crisis by trying to protect it—a strategy that failed.
When another steel crisis hit in the 1990s, the European Union (EU) rejected
protection and was successful in supporting restructuring, helping more than half a
million displaced workers to retrain and find work in other industries.
* * *
MGI's work over the last two decades shows that, in country after country, getting
regulation right has been the key to boosting productivity and competitiveness.
Moreover, we think policy makers will boost their odds of success if they take a
sector view and draw on experience to learn what kinds of approaches to improving
competitiveness have been effective—and which have not—in different sectors
and situations. This is the analytical route MGI has taken in this report. By design,
this approach generates detailed, actionable recommendations for public policy.
Understanding the microeconomic barriers to competitiveness and growth allows
MGI to identify the policy changes needed to improve performance, as well as to
highlight critical regulatory constraints affecting specific sectors. Neither of these
sets of insights is available through more traditional aggregate economic analyses.

17
Mostclassicalacademicandpolicyresearchhaslookedthroughaneconomy-widelensto
understandtheissueofcompetitiveness.Yetsuchaggregateperspectivesfailtocapture
thedriversofcompetitivenessthatvaryfromsectortosector—aswellasthedifferentimpact
thatregulationandpolicyinthebroadersensecanhaveinvarioussettings.Itisnosurprise
thattop-downeconometricassessmentsofwhatdrivescompetitivenesshaveoftenproved
inconclusiveandthatgovernmentinterventioninmarketshastendedtobehitormiss.6
We offer a new approach. Over the course of nearly two decades, MGI has used
sector-level research in more than 20 countries and 28 industrial sectors, employing
microeconomic intelligence to build a picture of macroeconomic outcomes.7
We
believe that this micro-to-macro approach is vital in answering the question of
enhancing competitiveness. To be able to explain differences in sector growth rates
across countries, we need to understand the key drivers of competitiveness in each
sector; how countries differ in their initial conditions; and the impact of a particular
policy environment (see box 2, “The role of government in market economies”).
Box 2. The role of government in market economies
Policies have a strong impact on the competitiveness of all types of sector—but
in radically different ways. For government policy, it is useful to think of sectors in
three categories, each of which presents different challenges.
Competitive markets account for about 50 to 60 percent of economic activity. In
this category, private-sector companies provide goods and services in competition
with each other. These sectors include manufacturing (e.g., automotive and
food processing) and services (e.g., food retail, retail banking, and construction).
Government has a dual role in setting the institutional structure that facilitates those
transactions that underpin a market economy, and in crafting regulation so that
6 Economic growth is analyzed from a macroeconomic perspective in the Solow growth model
(1956); in the New Growth models in the 1980s and 1990s by Paul Romer, Robert Barro, and
Robert Lucas Jr. among others; in the Schumpeterian growth models highlighting the role of
innovation and creative destruction by Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman among others;
as well as in the recent institutional and geographic growth literature introduced by Daron
Acemoglu and others. In the past decade, economists have started to look for sector patterns
behind aggregate economic growth. Prominent analyses include the OECD’s program The
Sources of Economic Growth in OECD Countries, 2003 (http://www.oecd.org/dac/ictcd/docs/
otherdocs/OtherOECD_eco_growth.pdf). Also see the European Commission’s EU KLEMs
sector-level data-collection effort: Mary O’Mahoney and Bart van Ark, eds., EU Productivity and
Competitiveness: An Industry Perspective, European Commission, 2003 (http://www.ggdc.net/
databases/60_industry/2006/papers/eu_productivity_and_competitiveness.pdf). This work has
focused largely on understanding how different sectors have contributed to overall economic
growth. Our work goes further in seeking to understand through case studies how sectors differ
in the ways that various external and policy factors explain their competitiveness and growth.
7 See Martin Neil Baily and Robert M. Solow, “International productivity comparisons built from the
firm level,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 15, Number 3, summer 2001, pp. 151–72.
For those interested in reading MGI reports on productivity and competitiveness in different
countries, regions, and sectors, visit http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/rp/CSProductivity/.
1. Looking at sectors is the key
to understanding competitiveness
and growth

18
there is minimal unintended distortion to market incentives.8
These roles include
establishing clear property rights and rules governing contracts; ensuring legal and
fiscal reporting requirements are not unnecessarily costly and are evenly enforced;
and implementing pro-competitive regulation and antitrust laws. Beyond these core
tasks, governments tend also to take a broader approach that includes correcting
for market imperfections (e.g., externalities such as pollution and information
asymmetries), ensuring consumer health and safety, and meeting other strategic and
social objectives (e.g., maintaining heritage sites through zoning laws).
Noncompetitive sectors account for some 10 to 20 percent of economic activity.
The nature of these sectors means that there is no effective competitive dynamic
among private-sector companies due to natural monopoly economics related to
high-scale economics (e.g., utilities or telecommunications) and/or exclusive access
to critical natural resources such as oil, coal, and wireless spectrum. In these sectors,
government sets the rules of competition and incentives for private-sector players or,
in the case of many countries, for state-owned enterprises.
Nonmarket activities account for around 25 to 35 percent of activity. These sectors
include both pure public-sector services, such as defense, as well as health care
and education. These sectors tend not to lend themselves well to purely market-
based transactions because of long time lags between service and resulting benefits
and their lack of easily observable metrics for quality. These are sectors where
government has a more direct role as a regulator or operator.9
MGI’s in-depth sector analysis demonstrates that there is no one-size-fits-all
explanation for the growth performance of sectors and that the key factors driving
different degrees of performance vary by type of sector. To streamline our analysis of
a complex picture, we have defined a new framework for analyzing competitiveness
of sectors that divides the full range of sectors into six groups that share certain
characteristics and respond to particular policy approaches.
MGI’S NEW FRAMEWORK IS BASED ON SIX SECTOR GROUPS
To arrive at our six group classifications, we use two major factors (Exhibit 1):
1. How tradable is a sector and therefore how subject to international
competition is it? Sectors with significant imports and exports compete with
international suppliers, and their performance relative to their counterparts in other
regions matters for growth and employment performance. In contrast, sectors that
largely focus on domestic markets—local services such as retail, for instance—tend
to reflect local demand and the national regulatory environment directly.
8 Scott C. Beardsley and Diana Farrell, “Regulation that is good for competition,” McKinsey
Quarterly, 2005 Number 2 (www.mckinseyquarterly.com).
9 This research focuses on private-sector performance but not that of the public sector. In the
latter, competitiveness as we define it is difficult to measure because of a lack of reliable output
measures or clear causality between sector expansion and underlying productivity and cost
performance. McKinsey has addressed sectors including public services, health care, and
education in other publications, including Tony Danker et al., How can the American government
meet its productivity challenge? McKinsey & Company, July 2006; and Thomas Dohrmann and
Lenny T. Mendonca, “Boosting government productivity,” McKinsey Quarterly, November 2004
(www.mckinseyquarterly.com). For those interested in health care, please see reports published
by MGI at http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/rp/healthcare/. For an analysis of education, see
Michael Barber and Mona Mourshed, How the world’s best-performing school systems come
out on top, McKinsey & Company, September 2007 (http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/
Social_Sector/our_practices/Education/Knowledge_Highlights/Best_performing_school.aspx.

2. What degree of differentiation—or standardization—does a sector display?
For commodity products, cost is the critical competitiveness driver. In sectors with
more variance in quality, design, and so on, noncost factors such as expertise,
innovation, and brand are key factors. Policy design needs to take account of these
differences. For instance, policies that help to create scale or reduce transportation
costs may be critical for commodity sectors, while education and R&D policies may
matter more in sectors where differentiation is a significant feature.
Exhibit 1
1.6
1.2
0
100101
0.4
0.8
-0.8
-0.4 Infrastructure
Local
services
Business
services
Resource-
intensive
industries
Manufacturing
R&D-intensive
manufacturing
MGI categorizes sectors into six groups according
to degrees of differentiation and tradability
SOURCE: EU KLEMS growth and productivity accounts; OECD input-output tables; McKinsey Global Institute analysis
Size of circle = relative amount
of sector value added in 2005
Differentiation index
0 = average
Differentiationofproducts
High
Low
Tradability of products
Imports plus exports divided by sector gross output
%
Low High
EXHIBIT 1
Electricity
Construction
Hotels and restaurants
Land
transport
Wholesale and
retail trade
Post and
telecommunication Finance and
insurance
Real-estate
activities
Computer and
related activities
R&D
Pulp, paper, printing,
and publishing
Agriculture,
forestry,
and fishing
Wood
products
Rubber and plastics
Basic
metals
Fabricated metals
Machinery and
equipment
Motor vehicles
Pharma
Chemicals
Radio, TV, and
communication
equipment
Medical
instruments
Aircraft and spacecraft
Other
Other
Each of the six groups comprises sectors with similar underlying economics and industry
dynamics. Depending on the development stage or income level of a country, these
sector groups have different degrees of importance for the overall economy (Exhibit 2).
1. Infrastructure services
Infrastructure services comprise sectors such as utilities, telecommunications,
and railroads—industries with large fixed costs for the construction of network
infrastructures. Because of the large economies of scale in these sectors, unregulated
markets do not lead to an effective competitive dynamic among private-sector
companies. Instead, industry regulation needs to set the rules of competition and
incentives for efficient company operations. Regulation can change behavior—a
classic example being electric utilities regulation that can pay companies to expand
the volume they deliver or alternatively reward companies that promote higher
energy efficiency among their customers.10
Or take mobile telecoms. The regulatory
environment needs to find the right balance between the cost savings available from
single large-scale operators (who can amortize network build-out costs at a lower cost
per customer and save on other fixed operating costs) with the incentives created by
competition to offer new, attractive, and affordable service packages to consumers.11
10 For more detail, see Curbing global energy demand growth: The energy productivity
opportunity, McKinsey Global Institute, May 2007, as well as reports on energy productivity in
the United States, the EU, and China (http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/rp/energymarkets/).
11 In wireless telephony, McKinsey estimates show that the economic benefits to users exceed
three times the sector value added in emerging Asian economies. See Kushe Bahl et al.,

20
2. Local services
This group provides services to local households and businesses, including wholesale
and retail trade; hotels and restaurants; and finance and insurance. This group accounts
for the largest employment among most middle- and high-income countries.12
Business
turnover tends to be high and growth comes from more productive companies gaining
share or replacing less productive ones. Competitive intensity is a key driver of growth in
this group of sectors by providing an incentive for ongoing innovation and the adoption
of better practices. In addition, competitive pressure ensures that companies pass
productivity gains on to consumers as more attractive products and lower prices.13
The
more appealing offerings in turn boost demand, creating a virtuous cycle of expanding
domestic demand and sector growth. Government’s key role is to create the right policy
environment to boost competition among private companies.
Exhibit 2
SOURCE: Global Insight; Economist; McKinsey Global Institute analysis
Total value added by sector group for select countries, 2005
%, $ billion
5754
48394440
35
28
43
15
9
13
966
8
7
5
6
111415
12
6
13
16
55118
Infrastructure
Local services
Business services
Resource-
intensive
industries
Manufacturing
R&D-intensive
manufacturing
United
States
9,883
8
10
4
Japan
4,095
11
10
Germany
2,061
10
10
Czech
Republic
96
16
17
3
South
Korea
596
11
16
Russia
585
15
30
2
Brazil
628
15
24
5
China
1,992
10
31
India
610
13
32
4
3
Goods
Services
Low High
Per capita GDP, 2005
$ PPP
4,136 8,209 11,893 18,753 20,203 30,160 30,309 42,6432,158
Income level
EXHIBIT 2
Service sectors constitute ~75 percent of the economy in developed
countries and more than half in most middle-income countries
3. Business services
Business services including computer and related activities, R&D, and professional
services can be either domestic or tradable and are the fastest-growing sector
group globally. Competitive business services require a regulatory environment
that enables effective competition among private companies, including sufficient
intellectual property (IP) rights that are important in software, digital media, and
similar sectors. Because business services typically require a skilled workforce, the
quality of education and research funding also matters for competitiveness. The
capacity of governments to influence sector competitiveness therefore includes not
only setting the right regulatory environment (as in local services) but also creating
a talent pool through basic and university education. Government can help ensure
Wireless unbound: The surprising economic value and untapped potential of the mobile
phone, McKinsey & Company and GSM Association, December 2006.
12 The World Bank defines middle-income economies as those with per capita GNI in 2003
between $766 and $9,385, measured using the average exchange rate of the past two years.
13 For descriptions of how IT use diffused across retail and retail banking companies in the
United States as a result of competitive pressure, see How IT enables productivity growth,
McKinsey Global Institute, October 2002 (www.mckinsey.com/mgi).

sufficient skills by supporting local research capabilities through government
contracts (e.g., defense contractors or technical consultants) or through R&D
subsidies to the private sector (e.g., public innovation funds or research grants).
4. R&D-intensive manufacturing
In these fast-moving, globally traded sectors such as pharmaceuticals or radio, television,
and communication equipment, the capacity to deliver differentiated products swiftly
to market is critical. Global industry dynamics and competition between companies
determine the growth of local industries. Success requires a skilled workforce that can
continuously deliver competitive products for new generations of technology, keeping
pace with a changing marketplace. Low-cost production capacity is also important if
companies are to compete on price, as is the case with more established products.14
Intense global competition explains the rapid productivity growth in these sectors and
ensures that benefits from innovation pass on to consumers in the form of lower prices.15
The rapidly changing nature of industries in this group has made it hard for governments
to influence competitiveness and performance directly. Government efforts to set the
direction of technological development, for instance, have largely failed.16
It is true that
public policy makers can strengthen the attractiveness of their location by acting as an
enabler—for example, training a skilled workforce, a necessary condition for any R&D-
intensive activity; supporting R&D activities through universities or other research funds;
and creating domestic demand for emerging new solutions (e.g., feed-in tariffs for wind
or solar power). Some governments have played a useful enabling role but, in general,
the odds of successful public interventions in these sectors are low and often expensive.
Indeed, collectively government support across countries can lead to global overcapacity
and low returns to investors, as we have observed in the semiconductor industry.
5. Manufacturing
Manufacturing sectors such as motor vehicles, cloth and apparel, and food, drink, and
tobacco are tradable and compete on both cost and the capacity to differentiate on quality
and brand. Competitiveness depends on a broad set of factors that together determine the
“value for money” delivered. Because the importance of different factors varies according
to the specific activity, countries’ competitiveness needs to be assessed for specific
products and/or steps in the value chain. For instance, the roles of technical expertise,
logistics, and labor costs vary between different automotive or computer components.
14 In many segments, product-related services can be a very important part of a differentiated
offering. Services represent more than 50 percent of revenues for computer companies IBM and
HP as well as elevator supplier Otis and Rolls-Royce’s engine division. These service sectors range
from customized software services to elevator and airplane engine maintenance contracts.
15 The example of semiconductor and computing products illustrates how lower prices for better
products has helped grow the market by expanding the user base. However, these lower
prices also mean that investment in productivity improvements in these sectors may not be
captured by companies in the sector itself (e.g., despite the semiconductor sector being a
major contributor to US productivity growth over the past 15 years, its share of GDP and
employment has actually declined).
16 Examples include France’s Minitel program, a publicly supported precursor to the Internet, and
Brazil’s unique TV standards. For more detail on the latter, see New horizons: Multinational
company investment in developing economies, chapter on consumer electronics, McKinsey
Global Institute, October 2003 (http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/reports/pdfs/newhorizons/
Consumer.pdf); also see E. Luzio and S. Greenstein, “Measuring the performance of a
protected infant industry: The case of Brazilian microcomputers,” Review of Economics and
Statistics, 77, 622–33, 1995.

22
Because they see manufacturing as an important source of attractive jobs and export
revenues, governments frequently use policy to foster emerging local production
or to support ongoing operations. The policy tools used have varied widely, ranging
from protecting local production from global competition (typically through trade
barriers or local market regulations) to providing incentives for exports (through
favorable financing to local companies or incentives to foreign investors) or providing
financial backing for ailing local players. In some sectors like automotive, policy
has not only shaped global trade and production patterns but also contributed to
expanding the world’s capacity through investment incentives, changing the global
industry economics. Our research shows that there is no one-size-fits-all policy—a
wide variety of approaches have helped establish a local manufacturing industry in
different regions. A government’s capacity to boost growth depends on whether it
targets policy at activities with real potential for comparative advantage, as well as
how it executes those policies.
6. Resource-intensive industries
Resource-intensive industries such as oil, coal, and basic metals, as well as
agriculture and forestry, are typically tradable-commodity businesses that require
substantial up-front capital investment. Cost is the major purchase factor, and
measuring sector competitiveness in these sectors relies on understanding the cost
position relative to other suppliers.17
Cost-competitive regions usually have access to
natural resources, sufficient scale and operational efficiency, and logistical network
to access major markets.18
Yet the large costs and the time it takes to adjust capacity
make these sectors susceptible to large swings in price and capacity utilization when
demand trends change.
Government role in these sectors is typically much broader than solely establishing an
efficient market environment. First, policy needs to decide who has access to natural
resources and under what terms, determining industry incentives and the capacity for
growth and efficiency.19
Second, many of these industries go through an inverted-U
development cycle. Governments help shape the evolution of the industry structure,
which, because of large fixed costs, typically adjusts more slowly than is the case in
services. Early in a sector’s development, governments have helped fund new capacity
either directly through state-owned enterprises or by providing trade protection or
favorable financing to private investors. In the mature phase, governments tend to focus
on coordinating downsizing and restructuring to reduce overcapacity.
17 For a description of McKinsey’s cost-based supply-curve methodology for understanding
the competitiveness of different suppliers, see Carter F. Bales et al., “The microeconomics of
industry supply,” McKinsey Quarterly, June 2000.
18 The relative importance of these factors varies by industry. For extractive industries such as
oil or natural gas, access to the resource is critical. For more processed basic metals like steel
and aluminum, scale, technology, and operational efficiency are also very important. The role
of logistics depends on the value-to-bulk ratio of products and whether industries (such as oil
and natural gas) compete globally or are more narrowly bound to a particular region (as in coal
or flat steel).
19 See Unlocking economic growth in Russia: Oil sector, McKinsey Global Institute, October
1999 (www.mckinsey.com/mgi); and Productivity-led growth for Korea: Steel sector, McKinsey
Global Institute, March 1998 (www.mckinsey.com/mgi).

23
A granular analysis of competitiveness in each sector, rather than simply
looking at the aggregate, macroeconomic level, reveals important insights. Our
research has found three key patterns that we believe should inform efforts to
promote competitiveness:
1. The competitiveness of sectors matters more than the sector mix. Some
governments worry about the “mix” of their economies, but our research finds
that countries outperforming their peers do not have a more favorable sector mix
propelling higher growth. Rather, their individual sectors are more competitive
than their counterparts elsewhere.
2. To generate jobs, service-sector competitiveness is the key. In economies as
a whole, increasing productivity is essential to overall GDP growth. But patterns
of growth differ between sectors. A sector’s growth—defined as its contribution
to aggregate GDP growth—can come from expanding employment or boosting
productivity. Productivity improvements are a key factor in all sectors, but services
have accounted for all net job growth in developed economies and 85 percent of
net new jobs in middle-income countries.
3. Competitiveness in new innovative sectors is not enough to boost
economy-wide employment and growth. Although innovations in niche sectors
can enable business process improvements in other sectors, growth in “cutting-
edge” emerging sectors such as cleantech alone will not boost economy-wide
competitiveness. Such sectors are too small.
As a starting point to any effort to boost growth and competitiveness, governments need
to take account of the stage of development of their economy, which matters for the role
different sectors play in overall GDP growth. Expertise honed during the industrial stage
of development is likely to prove inappropriate when an economy has entered its mature
phase and the challenge is to boost the competitiveness of service sectors.
The evolution of sector contributions to value added as economies develop is one of
the most consistent economic patterns observed. Essentially, the share of agriculture
tends to decline in the early stages of economic development. Then, in the middle-
income stage, an inverted-U shape is typical as industrial sectors peak and then
begin to decline. Services grow continuously as a share of GDP as we move along the
income and economic development curve (Exhibit 3).20
20 Many early development economists have recognized this pattern, including A. G. B. Fisher
in The Clash of Progress and Security, London: MacMillan, 1935; C. Clark, The Conditions
of Economic Progress, London: MacMillan, 1940, revised and reprinted in 1951; Simon
Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure and Spread, New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1966; P. Kongsamut, S. Rebelo, and D. Xie, “Beyond balanced growth,”
Review of Economic Studies, 2001, 68, 869–82; and V. R. Fuchs, The Service Economy, New
York and London: Columbia University Press, 1968.
2. Patterns in sector
contributions to growth challenge
conventional wisdom

24
Exhibit 3
Advancing through the developmental stages,
the relative importance of sectors shifts
Low-income countries
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
1970 1980 1990 2000
Middle-income countries High-income countries
EXHIBIT 3
% of GDP, 1970–2001
1Industry: manufacturing, mining, and construction; services: personal, professional, and public-sector services and utilities.
2The World Bank defines middle-income economies as those with per capita GNI in 2003 between $766 and $9,385 measured
with average exchange rate over past two years.
SOURCE: World Development Indicators, World Bank; McKinsey Global Institute analysis
Services1
Industry2
Agriculture
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
1970 1980 1990 2000
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
1970 1980 1990 2000
Because of these patterns, the stage of development of an economy matters to the role
different sectors play in overall GDP growth. In low- and middle-income economies,
the performance of expanding industrial sectors is critical. We are not aware of any
emerging economy that would have sustained rapid growth without a substantial
contribution from its industrial sector.21
While there is growing interest in finding more
carbon-light growth paths for emerging economies to “leapfrog” over their industrial
phase, the past doesn’t provide us with any models to follow. Among middle-income
economies, industry has contributed a little less than half of all growth (46 percent)
while the contribution of services has been just over half (54 percent). On average, this
broadly reflects the share of these two sectors in the economy (Exhibit 4).
In high-income economies, services represent about three-quarters of value added
and have contributed 87 percent of GDP growth since 1985, a trend we expect to
continue (Exhibit 5). At this stage of development, the biggest challenge is how to
downsize mature, increasingly labor-light industrial capacity, and to replace lost jobs in
high-skilled and service-sector activities. In the latter case, well-functioning domestic
markets become an increasingly important factor determining the overall performance
of an economy.22
As these economies move through this cycle of creative destruction,
policy makers need to learn new skill sets. Expertise learned in direct industrial support
21 Also see Dani Rodrik, “Industrial development: Some stylized facts and policy directions,”
in Industrial Development for the 21st Century: Sustainable Development Perspectives,
Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, 2007 (http://www.un.org/esa/
sustdev/publications/industrial_development/full_report.pdf); and John Weiss, Export Growth
and Industrial Policy: Lessons from the East Asian Miracle Experience, ADB Institute Discussion
Paper No. 26, February 2005 (http://www.adbi.org/files/2005.02.dp26.eastasia.govt.policy.pdf).
22 South Korea and the Republic of Ireland are both examples of countries that have
been phenomenally successful in their goods-producing sectors, but at a cost to the
competitiveness of local services. This will be the next frontier for both. For more details on
the Republic of Ireland, see Diana Farrell, Jaana Remes, and Conor Kehoe, “Service sector
productivity: The tiger’s next challenge,” chapter 2 of Perspectives on Irish Productivity, Forfas,
March 2007 (http://www.forfas.ie/media/productivity_chapter2.pdf ). Also see Productivity-led
growth for Korea, McKinsey Global Institute, March 1998 (www.mckinsey.com/mgi).

is inappropriate for service sectors where governments can be most effective when
playing a more indirect role in enabling private-sector-driven growth.
Exhibit 4
32
7
15
7
15
46
24
100
54
SOURCE: Global Insight; International Labor Organization; National Statistics; McKinsey Global Institute analysis
1 World Bank defines middle-income countries as countries with 2008 per capita GNI from $976 to $11,905. Value-added
and employment data available in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Egypt, Hungary,
Jordan, Malaysia, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, and Uruguay.
Sector contribution to growth of value added and employment in middle-income countries1,
1985–2005
100% = $2.6 trillion
EXHIBIT 4
In middle-income countries, services have contributed just over half of
overall growth, and goods-producing sectors the rest
Goods
Services
R&D-intensive
manufacturing
Manufacturing
Resource-
intensive
industries
Business services
Local services
Infrastructure
Exhibit 5
58
18
4
12
13
100
2
87
6
1 World Bank defines high-income countries as those with 2008 per capita GNI of $11,906 or more. Value-added and
employment data available in EU-15, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore,
Switzerland, and the United States.
Sector contribution to growth of value added and employment in high-income countries1, 1985–2005
100% = $10.4 trillion
EXHIBIT 5
Services have contributed 87 percent of GDP growth in high-income
countries in the last decades
Goods
Services
R&D-intensive manufacturing
Manufacturing
Resource-intensive industries
Business services
Local services
Infrastructure
In the next three sections, we discuss the three major patterns that emerge from
our analysis.

26
2.1 The competitiveness of sectors matters
more than the sector mix
Some observers argue that countries can outperform their peers because they
have a mix of sectors that has a more favorable growth momentum. Our analysis
clearly indicates that this is not the case. In fact, the mix of sectors does not explain
differences in the growth performance of countries with similar income levels at
all.23
The mix of sectors is surprisingly similar across countries at broadly equivalent
stages of economic development. Most countries—and large regions—have a
large share of comparable activities including retail and other local services, local
manufacturing like food processing, as well as construction, transportation, and
other infrastructure services. The small deviations in these sector shares matter less
than their performance relative to their peers.24
Over the past decade, overall GDP growth in developed countries has ranged
from 0.4 percent annually in Japan to 3.3 percent in the United States (see the
left column of Exhibit 6). Taking into account that every country has its own mix of
sectors—within a broadly similar pattern—we calculated how much each country
would have increased its value added if each sector had grown at the average rate in
these countries. This growth—predicted by a country’s specific sector mix or “growth
momentum”—actually shows a very narrow distribution of between 1.8 percent for
South Korea and 2.3 percent for the United States, France, and Germany (see the
middle column of the exhibit). By contrast, the difference between the real growth rate
and this growth momentum is much larger, ranging from 0.9 percent in the United
States to minus 1.7 percent for Japan (see the column to the right).
This illustrates that it is not the mix of sectors that decides the growth in developed
economies but rather the actual performance within the sectors compared with their
counterparts in peer economies.25
This exercise produced a similar pattern in developing countries (Exhibit 7). There
was a slightly wider variation in terms of the growth predicted by a country’s
specific sector mix—the growth momentum—from 5.2 percent for India to 6.7
percent in Russia. This is largely as a result of differences in shares of agriculture
and manufacturing in the early stages of economic development. Nevertheless,
the exhibit again demonstrates that it is the variation in the actual performance of
the countries highlighted within their given sector mix—from 3.4 percent in the case
of China to minus 4.1 percent for South Africa—that explains overall differences
23 In the very early stages of economic development, the shift of labor from agriculture to more
productive industries and services is a major contributor to growth. We focus on economies
where this sector transition has largely occurred. Our findings are consistent with Bart van Ark,
“Sectoral growth accounting and structural change in post-war Europe”, in B. Van Ark and N.
F. R. Crafts, eds., Quantitative Aspects of Post-War European Economic Growth, pp. 84–164,
Cambridge, MA: CEPR/Cambridge University Press; and Florence Jaumotte and Nikola
Spatafora, “Asia rising: Patterns of economic development and growth,” chapter 3, World
Economic Outlook, International Monetary Fund, September 2006. Also see Diana Farrell,
Antonio Puron, and Jaana Remes, “Beyond cheap labor: Lessons for developing economies,”
McKinsey Quarterly, 2005 Number 1 (www.mckinseyquarterly.com).
24 Furthermore, the current size of a sector may not be a good predictor of a sector’s capacity
to grow in the future. Germany and South Korea have a larger share of manufacturing in their
economies than the United States or Singapore—yet the contribution of the manufacturing
sector to overall growth will depend on the capacity of these countries to outperform their peers.
25 Our sector categories included more than 100 sectors found in McKinsey’s sector-growth
database. The results hold if we limit the sectors to two-digit International Standard Industrial
Classification (ISIC) categories.

in growth. China displayed the lowest growth momentum but the highest actual
growth. South Africa had the highest growth momentum but the lowest overall
growth. This demonstrates the fact that, even if they started with a less favorable
sector mix, the fastest-growing countries outperformed their peers in terms of their
sector competitiveness.26
Exhibit 6
2.1
2.3
2.3
2.2
1.8
2.3
Sector performance has mattered more than the mix of sectors for
overall GDP growth in developed countries
SOURCE: Global Insight; McKinsey Global Institute analysis
Growth Total growth
0.4
0.8
2.1
2.6
2.6
3.3
Growth momentum
(growth predicted by
initial sector mix)1
Differences in
performance
of sectors2
-1.7
-1.5
-0.2
0.4
0.7
0.9
Contribution to total value added, 1995–2005
Compound annual growth rate, %
1 Country growth rate calculated as if all sectors would have grown with sector-specific growth rate average across all
developed countries.
2 Actual country growth minus growth momentum of initial sector mix.
EXHIBIT 6
United
States
South
Korea
United
Kingdom
France
Germany
Japan
High
Low
Exhibit 7
6.0
5.9
6.7
6.0
5.2
5.7
Sector performance matters more than sector mix in developing countries
as well.
SOURCE: Global Insight; McKinsey Global Institute analysis
Growth Total growth
1.9
3.5
3.6
3.9
5.5
9.1
Growth momentum
(growth predicted by
initial sector mix)1
Differences in
performance
of sectors2
-4.1
-2.5
-3.1
-2.1
0.3
3.4
Contribution to total value added, 1995–2005
Compound annual growth rate, %
High
Low
1 Country growth rate calculated as if all sectors would have grown with the sector-specific growth rate average across all
developing countries.
2 Actual country growth minus growth momentum of initial sector mix.
EXHIBIT 7
China
India
Mexico
Russia
Brazil
South
Africa
26 There are many reasons that explain the differences in sector performance across countries,
including the general macroeconomic and policy environment, sector-specific regulation, and
various starting points. Understanding the role of these different factors is the key focus of this
research project.

28
2.2 To generate jobs, service-sector competitiveness
is the key
Not all growth is created equal. In other words, the drivers of growth differ from
sector to sector. As we have noted, sector growth can come either from expanding
sector employment or by increasing productivity. Policy makers seeking to expand
employment opportunities need to differentiate between those sectors where growth
is largely a productivity story with a flat or declining employment trend and sectors
where new job generation largely fuels growth—focusing their efforts on the latter.
As we have noted, growth patterns vary by level of income. In developed economies,
almost 90 percent of value-added growth comes from services and only 10 percent
from goods-producing industries. And in goods-producing sectors, growth has
come from productivity growth as overall employment has declined. Productivity
gains in these sectors have contributed 0.6 percent a year to economy-wide
productivity growth in developed economies, while declining employment shaved
0.3 percent annually off total employment in these economies between 1995 and
2005. At best, a handful of successful countries—including Finland—have been
able to replace lost manufacturing jobs with new ones, thereby keeping overall
manufacturing employment stable.
The large contribution of services to overall GDP growth in developed economies
is due to both net employment and productivity growth. Service sectors have been
the source of all net job creation in developed economies. Differences in domestic
service-sector job creation explain most of the overall variation in job generation
among developed economies. In addition, productivity growth across all kinds of
services, including local services where process innovations can be important, has
been a major contributor to overall sector growth (Exhibit 8).
Exhibit 8
Growth of value added
Growth of labor productivity
Growth of employment
2.6
0.3
Total
Services 2.2
Goods 1.4
0.6
0.8
1.1
1.5
-0.3
EXHIBIT 8
Sector contribution to growth of value added, labor productivity,
and employment for high-income countries1
Contribution to compound annual growth rate 1985–2005
In high-income countries, services generated more than 100 percent of net
job growth, and productivity grew across the board
1 World Bank defines high-income countries as those with 2008
per capita GNI of $11,906 or more. Value-added and
employment data available in EU-15, Australia, Canada, Hong
Kong, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore,
Switzerland, and the United States.

In middle-income countries, the story is more mixed as both goods-producing
sectors and services have expanded employment and boosted productivity.
Productivity improvements deliver more than 70 percent of value-added growth.
Goods contribute almost 60 percent of overall productivity growth, and services
contribute the rest. However, service sectors are responsible for 85 percent of all net
growth in employment in these countries (Exhibit 9).
Exhibit 9
Growth of value added
Growth of labor productivity
Growth of employment
5.0
2.3
Total
Services 2.7
Goods 3.6
2.1
1.5
1.4
0.2
1.2
EXHIBIT 9
Sector contribution to growth of value added, labor productivity,
and employment for middle-income countries1
Contribution to compound annual growth rate 1985–2005
In middle-income countries, productivity and job growth across a broad
range of sectors explains overall GDP growth
1 World Bank defines middle-income countries as those with
2008 per capita GNI from $976 to $11,905. Value-added and
employment data available in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil,
Bulgaria, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Egypt, Hungary,
Jordan, Malaysia, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania,
Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, and Uruguay.
2.3 Competitiveness in new innovative sectors
is not enough to boost economy-wide employment
and growth
Engaged in the art of the possible, many governments are tempted to focus on emerging,
innovative sectors as the key to their economies’ future competitiveness. Green or
cleantech is all the rage with governments around the world as they seek ways to promote
renewable energy technologies including solar and wind power and biomass. This
aspiration is consistent with the past when governments saw the development of high-
tech clusters including semiconductors as the route to economy-wide competitiveness.
It is true that cutting-edge new growth sectors—often in the vanguard of
technological change—can make a critical difference to a smaller region or a city
(e.g., the town of Oulu in Finland, home to a mobile-communications cluster).
However, governments looking to these sectors as new sources of economic activity
and jobs will largely find themselves disappointed. Boosting the competitiveness
of such sectors alone is not sufficient to sustain economy-wide growth in large,
diversified economies, simply as a matter of arithmetic (Exhibit 10).
Even if emerging innovative sectors offer high levels of value added per worker and
grow quickly, they are simply not big enough to make a significant difference to a large
economy’s overall growth rate, even taking into account potential linkages through

30
their suppliers. For instance, the phenomenally successful US semiconductor industry
currently generates only around 0.4 percent of US value added, down from 0.6 percent
in the boom year of 2000. India’s software sector is one of the most dynamic industries in
one of the fastest-growing economies in the world—yet it only accounts for 0.7 percent of
GDP (including both the broad IT-services sector and packaged software) and 0.1 percent
of overall employment. Compare this with Indian manufacturing industries that collectively
contribute 16 percent of GDP and employ 11 percent of the country’s workforce.
Exhibit 10
Even in the United States, innovative new sectors make a very small
economic contribution compared with large, established sectors
SOURCE: The Clean Energy Economy, PEW, 2009; Bureau of Labor Statistics; Haver analytics
Share of US employment, August 2009
Percent of nonfarm employment
100% = 130 million
New innovative sectors
0.6
0.30.2
Biotech CleantechSemiconductor
11.3
5.9
4.9
Construction Retail tradeFinancial
activities
Existing large employment sectors
EXHIBIT 10
While emerging sectors are small, their innovations can have much larger spillover effects
in the broader economy if they enable business-process improvements in other sectors.
For example, the semiconductor and software industries have helped to increase
labor productivity in securities trading substantially by facilitating the move to online
trading systems. Increasingly sophisticated retail supply-chain management software
has contributed not only to lower logistical costs but also to more accurate product
stocking and selection. Yet these user benefits are not guaranteed; most productivity
benefits require organizational and business-process changes that require much more
than enabling technology solutions.27
Nor do these user benefits typically require local
suppliers, as imported software solutions or computers can generate similar outcomes.
So, even taking into account the spillover benefits generated by innovative sectors, the
fact remains that these sectors alone cannot fuel economy-wide growth.
Governments therefore need to pursue policy efforts across the broad swathe of
existing industrial and service sectors. This stands to reason. The large employment
base of many of these activities means that even small differences in productivity
growth can make a big difference for overall GDP growth—much bigger than even
double-digit growth in a small niche segment. Take US retail as an illustration. To
produce the same overall GDP growth as a 1 percent increase in the productivity of
the substantial retail sector, the United States would have to increase productivity in
its successful, but smaller, semiconductor sector by almost 15 percent.
27 See How IT enables productivity growth, McKinsey Global Institute, October 2002
(www.mckinsey.com/mgi).

31
3. Governments need to tailor
policy to each sector
To boost the odds of success, governments need to tailor policies and the range
of available policy tools to suit each sector and then implement policy in close
collaboration with the private sector. The spectrum of available public-policy
intervention ranges from a hands-off approach limited to creating the necessary
market institutions to being a central operator in a sector.
We analyzed the policies used in different sectors in four categories that demonstrate
an increasing intensity of intervention:
1. Setting the ground rules and direction. Governments can limit sector policies
to setting the regulation covering labor and capital markets as well as the general
business environment, and setting broad national priorities and road maps.
2. Building enablers. Without interfering with market mechanisms, governments can
support private-sector activities by expanding hard and soft infrastructure, helping
to ensure adequate skills through education and training, and supporting R&D.
3. Tilting the playing field. Governments can choose to create favorable conditions
for local production, typically through trade protection from global competition,
the provision of financial incentives for local operations, or by shaping local
demand growth through public purchasing or regulation.
4. Playing the role of principal actor. At the interventionist end of the policy
spectrum, governments may play a direct role by establishing state-owned or
subsidized companies, funding existing businesses to ensure their survival, and
imposing restructuring on certain industries.
The nature of the sector matters for the kinds of policies that are effective in
promoting competitiveness. Exhibit 11 demonstrates what experience teaches us are
likely to be the most impactful policy approaches for each of the six sector groupings
in our framework.28
In nontradable sectors, sector performance correlates closely with the local policy
environment that sets the “rules of the game” for competitive market dynamics. MGI
case studies of the telecommunications and retail sectors show that the employment
and productivity outcomes of countries reflect the incentives to companies set by the
regulatory environment—and that policy changes can impact sector performance in
two to three years.
In traded sectors, where success requires local companies to be competitive in
the global marketplace, it is harder for government policy to impact performance
as directly and there is less room for error. Some regulations can unexpectedly halt
28 We synthesize our findings from more detailed case-study findings into patterns for the six
broad sector groupings we use as a framework for action in the chart. Governments should
also be more granular in their approach, tailoring policies for each sector, subsector, and step
in the value chain.

32
sector growth—as obscure national security review requirements did for Russian
software exports. In addition, financial incentives to failed initiatives can costs
governments billions, as many semiconductor ventures have done around the globe.
The best odds for sustained growth come with efforts to enhance competitiveness
that target those activities with a realistic potential for competitive advantage.
Beyond sector-specific policies, government can plan a positive coordinating
role across private-sector activities in a sector such as tourism (see box 3, “The
importance of government as coordinator in tourism”).
Exhibit 11
Government policy tools need to be tailored to suit
sector competitiveness drivers
SOURCE: McKinsey Global Institute/Public Sector Office Sector Competitiveness Project
Government as
principal actor
Tilting the
playing fieldBuilding enablers
Setting ground
rules/direction
EXHIBIT 11
Infrastructure
Degree of intervention
Resource-intensive
industries
Infrastructure
R&D-intensive
manufacturing
Business services
Local
services
Manufacturing
HighLow
Box 3. The importance of government as coordinator in tourism
Many governments have been proactive in their efforts to boost the growth of
tourism in their regions.29
Becoming an attractive location for tourists requires
a wide range of services, from the construction of large-scale airport and road
infrastructure to the provision of fragmented hotel and restaurant services.
Experience shows that government efforts to orchestrate consistency between
visitor expectations and this range of services have been important for success.
Competitive tourism regions need to satisfy some basic necessary conditions
that depend directly on the government. These conditions include adequate
transportation infrastructure, as well as safety, security, and sanitation. Often
a thriving tourism sector needs government to create the right zoning and
partnership models to deliver other services, including hotel zones and “flagship”
29 Tourism is an attractive sector for many governments because it is both labor intensive (unlike the
other sectors we studied, overall sector growth is driven by employment rather than productivity
growth) and has large local linkages and spillover effects. In the case of linkages, we refer to
backward multiplier effects when workers in the tourism sector spend their wages on local stores,
restaurants, and so on. By spillover effects, we mean economic benefits beyond those direct
linkages, including the lower cost of transportation for other sectors when airports and roads are
improved and the benefits to local consumers from the “beautification” of the environment.

tourist attractions. Government also has a role to play in ensuring a consistent
brand and the effective communication of tourism opportunities.
The experience of growing tourism industries in different countries demonstrates
the importance of these government roles. For instance, Mexico’s development
of the upmarket Riviera Maya beach resort area relied on broad, cross-sector,
coordinated public-sector efforts based on a good understanding of target
tourism segments. The government used zoning to ensure the development
of exclusive hotels, upscale restaurants, and boutiques that enabled average
hotel rates double those of Cancun, a more tightly built beach resort with a
deteriorating image 65 kilometers to the north. In Morocco, the highest level
of government (including the king) committed to developing the country as a
tourism destination. Government acted as coordinator, designing the strategy
and setting up an agency to manage the project, fund marketing, monitor
progress, and collaborate closely with the private sector. Together with tax
exemptions in favor of the industry, this high degree of coordination from the
center has almost doubled international arrivals in six years. In both cases,
government acted as a “strategic architect” of private-sector investments rather
than making direct public interventions.
Insufficient coordination in other countries has led to less than optimal results. In the
United Kingdom, the historic lack of a hotel grading system that is common in other
countries, as well as inconsistent and overly complicated planning, has inhibited the
competitive intensity of its hotels sector compared with France, for instance.30
We now offer summaries of some of the lessons we have learned from the experience
of policy making in each of the six sector cases we have studied.
1. INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES: WIRELESS
TELECOMMUNICATIONS
Designing a regulatory environment that maximizes the penetration of
telecommunication services at the lowest cost requires a good understanding
of the industry’s underlying economics. Focusing on achieving scale by having a
single supplier can lead to weak incentives to reduce prices below monopoly levels.
Yet focusing too much on creating competition can lead to fragmentation and a
higher cost base. The case of the US digital wireless sector illustrates the latter. The
United States auctioned spectrum licenses for relatively small geographic areas,
and more than 50 fragmented operators resulted. In the early period after they won
licenses, these operators had much smaller subscriber bases and higher per-user
costs for fixed marketing and human resources than did French and German mobile
operators—three and four operators respectively.31
The most effective regulatory approach also varies by level of income. In many low-
income countries, a key consideration is to ensure access to capital for the large network
infrastructure investments that are necessary. For this reason, overly fragmented
30 See Nicholas C. Lovegrove et al., “Why is labor productivity in the United Kingdom so low?”
McKinsey Quarterly, 1998 Number 4 (www.mckinseyquarterly.com); and UK productivity
report case study: Hotels, McKinsey Global Institute, October 1998 (www.mckinsey.com/mgi).
31 For more detail, see Thomas Kneip, Eric Labaye, and Jürgen Schrader, “Telecom: Advantage
France, Germany,” McKinsey Quarterly, February 2003 (www.mckinseyquarterly.com).

34
markets or too stringent coverage requirements may delay a sector’s growth because
license holders cannot raise the capital for expansion. As incomes increase and wireless
penetration broadens, the regulatory focus should shift to increasing competition and
prices (see box 4, “Evolving regulatory priorities in wireless telecommunications”).
Box 4. Evolving regulatory priorities in wireless
telecommunications
McKinsey has discerned three types of emerging markets with distinct
starting points and characteristics and therefore differing optimal regulatory
approaches (Exhibit 12):
Exhibit 12
McKinsey has identified three clusters within
emerging telecom markets
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
55
454035252015 13513012512011511010510030
Mature OECD1
EU-15
Ukraine
Romania
Fixed line penetration, 2005
Mobile penetration, 2006
95908580750 6560 705550
Bulgaria
UAEQatar
Israel
Czech Republic
South Africa
Saudi Arabia
Russia
Poland
Mexico
Malaysia Kuwait
Hungary
ChileArgentina
Turkey
Tunisia
Thailand
Philippines
Peru
Jordan
Colombia
China
Brazil
Algeria
Pakistan
MoroccoIndonesia
India
Egypt
$20,000 +
$10,000 < $20,000
$5,000 < $10,000
< $ 5000
Per capita GDP PPP adjusted
EXHIBIT 12
1OECD countries except Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, and Turkey.
SOURCE: International Telecommunications Union, Informa-World Cellular Information System (WICS+)
Percentage of population
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 1. Underpenetrated and low-income emerging markets—in this
group of countries (per capita GDP at PPP below $5,000; low fixed and mobile
service penetration), policy should focus on providing incentives for potential
stakeholders (for example, incumbents, cable operators, mobile operators,
and new players entering the market) to make necessary investments. The aim
should be to stimulate the provision of universal voice access largely through
increasing mobile penetration secured by universal coverage obligations. Once
voice access starts reaching levels close to 50 percent (as in the Philippines and
Morocco), policy makers can also focus on fixed networks in order to promote
broadband penetration. A secondary objective in this group should be to
promote lower prices by increasing competition and imposing tight regulation on
operators.
Group 2. Transition economies with high mobile penetration—policy for
this group (per capita GDP at PPP of $5,000 to $20,000; moderately high mobile
penetration) should mainly focus on increasing broadband penetration by
encouraging investment in fixed networks including fiber broadband, and through
financial and regulatory incentives. Policy makers should also begin regulating
to increase the level of competition in a mobile sector that will be seeing maturing
levels of penetration. However, given the continued need for investment to increase
the capacity and quality of the network, regulators in these countries should not
at this stage engage in a more aggressive value shift from operators to consumers
through, for example, providing open access to virtual network operators.

Group 3. Mobile leaders with high income per capita—in this group (per
capita GDP at PPP of $20,000 or higher; moderately high fixed penetration),
policy should aim to increase broadband penetration. Simply correcting
regulation to offer a more even playing field can be effective. At the same time,
policy needs to establish fair competition between mobile and fixed operators to
promote lower prices and the fast adaptation of new services. Direct or indirect
financial support for the rollout of such networks may also be necessary.32
Similar to the case of telecommunications, regulation fundamentally impacts the
evolution of other regulated industries. In electric utility sectors around the world, the
traditional regulatory focus has been to reward utilities for the volume of electricity
they deliver. Instead, regulators could adjust these incentives to encourage utilities
to boost more efficient energy use among their customers.33
In the United States,
California has kept its per capita energy consumption roughly constant for more than
30 years even while per capita consumption has grown by 50 percent in the rest of
the United States. California has achieved this stability in consumption largely due
to the fact that the state changed utility incentives and established more stringent
energy efficiency policies including appliance and lighting standards.
2. LOCAL SERVICES: RETAIL
MGI research shows that regulation alone can largely explain wide variations in the
productivity and employment of retail sectors around the world (Exhibit 13). Because
sectors like retail are so large, policy choices there can have a significant impact on an
economy’s overall GDP growth. In the United States, the combination of flexible, low-
minimum-wage labor regulation and intense competition enabled by liberal zoning
regulation has led to high productivity and employment.34
A regulatory environment that allows the expansion of more productive modern
supermarkets and convenience stores raises productivity because larger chains can
profit from scale benefits in purchasing, merchandizing, and store operations. Yet
many countries have chosen to protect small-scale stores through barriers to foreign
direct investment, zoning laws, or restrictions on the size of stores. In Japan, laws
limiting the entry of large supermarkets and providing incentives for small retailers
to stay in business explain the high share of family retailers and low productivity.35
In 1990s France, the introduction of more restrictive regulation over the size of retail
outlets halted the sector’s productivity growth.36
32 For the full analysis, see Scott Beardsley et al., “Rethinking regulation in emerging
telecommunications markets,” chapter 1.7, The Global Information Technology Report 2007-
2008, World Economic Forum, 2008 World Economic Forum.
33 Curbing global energy demand growth: The energy productivity opportunity, McKinsey Global
Institute, May 2007 (www.mckinsey.com/mgi).
34 Retail and wholesale sectors alone contributed just over half of the US productivity
acceleration in the late 1990s, an acceleration that ended decades of European catch-up
and increased Europe’s income gap with the United States. See How IT enables productivity
growth, McKinsey Global Institute, 2002 (www.mckinsey.com/mgi); and US productivity
growth 1995–2000, McKinsey Global Institute, 2001 (www.mckinsey.com/mgi).
35 Why the Japanese economy is not growing: Micro barriers to productivity growth,
McKinsey Global Institute, July 2000 (www.mckinsey.com/mgi).
36 Reaching higher productivity growth in France and Germany, McKinsey Global Institute,
October 2002 (www.mckinsey.com/mgi).

36
Conversely, policy changes that facilitate the entry of new retail competitors lead to
higher productivity growth. In Sweden, the liberalization of opening hours and zoning
regulation unleashed a greater degree of competition in retail, boosting its productivity
by an average of 4.6 percent for ten years starting in 1995, more than 2 percentage
points quicker than in the average developed country.37
In Russia, retailing has more
than doubled in the past ten years from 15 percent of the US level to 31 percent largely
due to an increasing share of modern retail formats that are three times as productive
as traditional ones.38
In Mexico, opening up the food retail sector internationally led to
increasing competition and lower prices (see box 5, “Retail in Mexico”).
Exhibit 13
Comparing countries shows a trade-off between employment and
labor productivity in retail sectors
1Labor productivity: value added converted with single-deflated expenditure, side-value added-specific PPP to $ divided by
hours worked. Levels converted for 1997; 2005 comparison extrapolated using growth in real value added and hours worked.
SOURCE: EU KLEMS; McKinsey Global Institute analysis
EXHIBIT 13
Retail employment and labor productivity in developed countries, 2005
Employment
Hours worked per capita
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 246 7
Labor productivity1
Value added ($ per hour worked)
0
100
40
50
9
60
70
80
90
0 8
Japan
United Kingdom
United
States
SwedenFrance
Germany
South Korea
Spain
Differences in the level of retail employment correlate closely with labor-market
regulations—another example of how regulatory ground rules explain sector
outcomes in services. Flexible hiring laws, lower minimum wages, and part-time
employment arrangements tend to boost retail employment. Differences in labor
regulation account for the large difference in the level of employment in the retail
sectors of France and the United Kingdom. Swedish retail has not had a good record
on job creation despite rising productivity because the sector continues to suffer
from labor inflexibility. For instance, agreements between employers and trade
unions mean that the cost of labor increases by 70 percent on weekday late evenings
and 100 percent on weekends, resulting in shorter, less customer-friendly business
hours, and limiting job creation. Moreover, high social employee taxes make retail
employees particularly expensive to hire, helping explain the very low employment
and service level in the sector.
37 Sweden’s economic performance, McKinsey Global Institute, September 1995
(www.mckinsey.com/mgi); and Sweden’s economic performance: Recent development,
current priorities, McKinsey Global Institute, May 2006 (www.mckinsey.com/mgi).
38 Lean Russia: Sustaining economic growth through improved productivity, McKinsey Global
Institute and McKinsey & Company, April 2009 (www.mckinsey.com/mgi).

Box 5. Retail in Mexico
The most important operational factor explaining differences in productivity in
retail is format mix—the share of modern supermarkets or convenience stores
relative to mom-and-pop stores and other traditional formats. In 1996, 92 percent
of food retail employees in Mexico worked in the traditional segment including
mercados and bakeries. Although Mexico had some modern formats at that
stage and these were on average three times more productive than traditional
stores, their small share in overall employment significantly diluted their impact on
the overall performance of the sector.
But when Mexico opened up its food retail sector to foreign companies, including
Wal-Mart, which acquired a local supermarket operator Cifra in the mid-1990s,
the sector began a period of dramatic change. Wal-Mart introduced many
operational practices common in US retail including the concentration of delivery
in large-scale distribution centers. This led to suppliers having to compete for
national, or at least regional, contracts, and they came under strong pressure
to improve performance. The response of Femsa and Grupo Modelo, volume
suppliers of soft drinks and beer, was to expand to retailing itself by investing
in rapidly growing convenience store chains. Mexico saw an explosion in the
number of convenience stores from a little more than 1,000 to more than 6,000
in five years, and this development was a major contributor to continuing
employment growth in the food retail sector. The Mexican consumer has been
an outright beneficiary with increased competitive intensity, meaning that food
prices have grown significantly less rapidly than other prices.39
3. BUSINESS SERVICES: SOFTWARE AND IT SERVICES
Knowledge-intensive business services such as software and IT services require
broadly market-friendly regulation to support strong growth as well as reliable electricity
and telecommunications services and sufficient IP rights. In India, the country’s
inadequate infrastructure severely delayed the growth of its IT services sector.40
In
China and Russia, widespread software piracy has been a major barrier to growth in the
packaged-software sector.41
By introducing and enforcing criminal antipiracy laws and
educating small and medium-sized companies about the legal risks of software piracy,
the Czech government cut piracy rates by half to below today’s French levels.42
Beyond these aspects, government can play a useful role in enabling the broadening
of the pool of technically skilled labor. India, the Republic of Ireland, and Israel—all
39 New horizons: Multinational company investment in developing economies, chapter on retail,
McKinsey Global Institute, October 2003
(www.mckinsey.com/mgi/reports/pdfs/newhorizons/Food.pdf).
40 New horizons: Multinational company investment in developing economies, chapter on
technology/business offshoring, McKinsey Global Institute, October 2003
(http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/reports/pdfs/newhorizons/IT_BPO.pdf).
41 The Chinese government has responded by committing to relying on legal software in
government agencies and requiring computers produced or imported to China to be
preloaded with legal software. For more on the case of the Russian software sector, see
Unlocking economic growth in Russia, McKinsey Global Institute, October 1999
(http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/reports/pdfs/russia/Softe.pdf).
42 For BSA and IDC Annual Global Software Piracy Studies, see
http://global.bsa.org/idcglobalstudy2007/studies/2007_global_piracy_study.pdf.

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